Principal Engineer

Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership:

Integration Architecture & API Platform

• Own the end-to-end integration architecture for the DTC platform - defining how internal services, packaged solutions, and external partners connect, communicate, and exchange data.

• Lead the design and governance of PUMA's API gateway strategy on Apigee, including policy framework, traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, and API product management.

• Define and enforce API design standards - RESTful patterns, GraphQL schema design principles, versioning strategy, deprecation policy, and contract-first development practices.

• Architect the GraphQL API layer that serves consumer-facing surfaces (web, mobile, agentic commerce), including schema stitching, federation strategy, and resolver performance optimisation.

• Design event-driven integration patterns using message brokers and streaming platforms to ensure loose coupling and high resilience across commerce and fulfilment services.

• Own the integration reference architecture for PUMA's composable commerce stack - ensuring Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Fluent Commerce OMS, payment gateways, and external logistics partners integrate cleanly and durably.

API Governance & Developer Enablement

• Establish and maintain an API governance framework - including design reviews, approval gates, documentation standards, and quality metrics - applied consistently across all engineering organisations.

• Build and own the internal API developer portal and integration catalogue, enabling product squads to discover, consume, and contribute integration capabilities efficiently.

• Define and enforce integration testing standards - contract testing, API regression suites, and integration environment strategy - across the platform.

• Champion developer productivity through reusable integration libraries, SDK patterns, and shared tooling that reduce the time-to-integrate for product squads.

• Produce clear architectural decision records (ADRs), integration playbooks, and runbooks that codify patterns and accelerate onboarding for new engineering squads.

AI-Native Integration Engineering

• Embed AI-native practices into the integration platform - from AI-assisted API design and automated contract generation to intelligent anomaly detection in integration pipelines.

• Architect integration patterns for agentic commerce and LLM-driven workflows, including tool-calling APIs, model context orchestration, and AI agent connectivity to commerce and fulfilment backends.

• Evaluate and adopt AI tooling (code generation, API testing, observability) that improves integration engineering velocity and quality across the platform.

• Partner with the Consumer Intelligence & Engagement team to ensure ML and GenAI services are exposed and consumed through well-governed, performant integration contracts.

Reliability, Observability & Security

• Define and own non-functional requirements for the integration layer - latency budgets, availability SLOs, retry and circuit-breaker patterns, and graceful degradation strategies.

• Design and implement comprehensive observability for all integration touchpoints - distributed tracing, API metrics dashboards, error budget tracking, and alerting on integration health.

• Own the security posture of the integration layer - OAuth 2.0 implementation, mutual TLS, secrets management, payload encryption, and PCI-DSS-compliant data handling for payment integrations.

• Lead capacity planning and load testing for critical integration paths, particularly during peak commerce events (product launches, seasonal peaks).

• Define incident response and escalation protocols for integration failures affecting consumer-facing surfaces.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as the senior-most technical authority on integration across all DTC engineering squads - providing architecture guidance, design review, and escalation support organisation-wide.

• Mentor and develop Lead and Senior Engineers in integration engineering patterns, API design, and distributed systems thinking.

• Drive a culture of engineering excellence - championing code quality, test coverage, documentation standards, and continuous improvement in integration practices.

• Represent PUMA's integration engineering perspective in cross-functional architecture forums and contribute to the broader DTC engineering strategy.

• Collaborate with vendor and partner engineering teams to define and enforce integration contracts, onboarding standards, and quality expectations.

Key Technologies:

API Gateway - Apigee/Kong or equivalent, API policy design, developer portal, traffic management

GraphQL - Federation, schema stitching, resolvers, subscriptions, GQL performance

REST & Standards - OpenAPI 3.x, RESTful design, versioning, contract testing

Event Streaming -Apache Kafka/Google Pub/Sub or AWS Kinesis, event schema design

Security- OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, secrets management (Vault / GCP Secret Manager)

Enterprise Integrations -Third-Party SaaS Integration (Payments, SFCC, Commerce Tools), Master Data systems, ERP, Supply Chain, OMS

AI Integration - LLM tool-calling APIs, model gateway patterns, AI-native integration workflows

Cloud Platform - GCP - API services, managed messaging, cloud-native deployment or AWS equivalent

Languages - Node.js, Python; Java or Go for performance-critical integration services

PUMA's Principal Engineers are expected to operate as enterprise-wide technical leaders who raise the capability of the entire engineering organisation - not just their immediate area of ownership. The following expectations apply to all Principal Engineers at PUMA.

Technical Leadership & Standards

• Own technical standards and architecture patterns for your domain and drive consistent adoption across all engineering organisations.

• Produce high-quality architectural decision records, technical proposals, and engineering guidelines that are clear, considered, and actionable.

• Engage in and lead design reviews and architecture forums with intellectual rigour and commercial awareness.

• Demonstrate deep, current technical expertise and a genuine commitment to continuous learning in your domain.

Craft & Quality

• Hold a consistently high bar for code quality, test coverage, documentation, and production readiness - and actively lift the bar for the teams around you.

• Champion AI-native engineering practices: use AI tooling to accelerate development, improve quality, and solve problems that would previously have required more time or resource.

• Balance the tension between pragmatism and perfectionism - know when good enough is right and when it is not.

Influence & Collaboration

• Build strong working relationships across engineering, product, and vendor teams based on technical credibility, clarity of thinking, and reliability.

• Influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams without direct authority - through well-reasoned positions, clear communication, and genuine curiosity about others' constraints.

• Operate effectively in ambiguity, providing technical direction and confidence to teams when requirements or priorities are unclear.

Mentorship & Culture Building

• Invest meaningfully in the development of Lead and Senior Engineers - through design reviews, pair programming, code review feedback, and open technical conversation.

• Build a culture of curiosity, psychological safety, and high technical standards - where engineers feel safe to challenge assumptions, propose bold ideas, and learn from failure.

• Act as a visible culture-builder as PUMA scales its DTC Engineering organisation: lead by example, celebrate engineering excellence, and bring energy and optimism to the task of building something from the ground up.

Building PUMA's Future

This is a rare opportunity to help define the integration backbone of a global sports brand's DTC engineering platform from day one. You will have the scope, support, and mandate to build something that matters - both for the millions of consumers who interact with PUMA's products and for the engineers who will work alongside you. If you are excited by the combination of deep technical challenge, genuine organisational influence, and the chance to build a world-class engineering culture, we want to hear from you.